The new National Education Policy (NEP) that was approved recently has been applauded by many. It has taken half a decade for the Government to come up with the policy document.
On December 2014, when Smriti Irani was the Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister, initial media reports came out about the new education policy being developed by the government. Since the beginning of the NEP’s development process, it has already seen 3 HRD ministers, multiple secretaries, 2 expert committees, and long consultation process.
The T. S. R. Subramanian Committee developed the first set of recommendations and the K. Kasturirangan Committee developed the second set of recommendations. It is a great loss for the country that T. S. R. Subramanian passed away in 2018 and couldn’t witness the final version of the NEP.
The NEP must get due credit for some of the reforms it has recommended, which, if implemented in the true spirit of the policy, will have long term positive impact. So far, all the different roles, such as planning, implementing, monitoring, and funding were done by the Ministry of Education, which I feel gave enough scope for internal ‘fudging’.
The NEP has recommended independent and autonomous bodies, specifically for the administration of school-level education, as well as higher education. It would completely change the regulatory architecture of education, bring in scope for specialization, and at the same time, increase accountability and transparency in the system.
The Right to Education Act of 2009 made several input norms such as infrastructure, teacher competency, class size, and more mandatory. It shifted the focus of education-related administration from learning outcomes to inputs, with serious consequences on access, cost, and quality of education. It even resulted in thousands of low-cost private schools closing down.
The NEP has recommended bringing back the focus on learning outcomes with ‘light but tight’ regulation. One of the demerits of the Indian education system for long has been its compartmentalization, with streams such as arts, commerce, and science, with almost no space to shift from one stream to another.
The NEP has also recommended for the propagation of multidisciplinary studies, giving students a choice to study subjects of one stream with another. Also, the multiple entries and exit points in higher education will empower students to plan and take courses in a manner that suits them the most. So, the rigidity of the education system will go away to a large extent.
Another missing piece of our public education system was the absence of early childhood education. This gap was addressed in private schools with the introduction of kindergarten, but public education started from the age of six years, with an entry into class one.
Now, according to the NEP, education will start at the age of 3 years, with 3 additional years of early childhood education by revamping the current arrangement from the ’10+2′ system to a ‘5+3+3+4’ one. The NEP has also placed emphasis on vocational education in the school years, and on research in higher education.
While the NEP has some major breakthroughs, it still disappoints in many aspects which, unless addressed, would make NEP meaningless.
- Firstly, it misses out on the aspirations of parents, and therefore on the trends.
Between 2011 to 2018, student enrollment in public schools fell down by 2.4 crores but increased by 2.1 crores in private schools. The trend is simple. The parents’ aspirations for quality education is changing, and therefore, they choose expensive private schools over free public schools. NEP’s public school-centric approach seems to go against the parents’ approach and might make itself irrelevant.
- Secondly, the NEP makes the same mistake of designing the policy by keeping teachers in the centre instead of students.
With the lack of competence and motivation coupled with the lack of accountability and incentives to perform, the old machine wouldn’t be able to produce new goods.
- Thirdly, the NEP has not been bold enough to address the biggest hypocrisy of education system: Educational institutes must be operated by charitable organizations and therefore must not make a profit.
It is an open secret that almost all educational institutes make a profit but sometimes through unfair practices. This fundamental hypocrisy results into flaws at multiple levels and sullies the sacred job of providing education. The new education policy of the 21st-century should have been bold enough to shed this core hypocrisy.
- Fourthly, the NEP reflects a complacent attitude, of ‘I know it all and therefore I can fix it all’.
The reality is that the world is changing at an unprecedented pace and the future is unpredictable. The life and nature of work may completely change in the decades to come. In such a scenario, the NEP could have focused more on developing human resources to deal with the uncertainty of the future.
The NEP needed to create a system which puts itself in an ‘auto-pilot’ mode, by giving the liberty and space to change its curriculum, pedagogy, technology integration with the changes in the real world rather than keeping the possible best of today. It would be completely disheartening to see the hard work of five years become redundant in 10 years.
Note: Dr Amit Chandra is a passionate promoter of market-based policy solutions with hands-on experience. Views expressed are his personal. You can reach the author on Twitter.